The outlaws pa-6

by W. E. B Griffin

  This earned him a look of mingled disbelief and annoyance from Pevsner.

  After a moment, Pevsner said, "The moment I first saw Charley, I realized that it would be painful for me to have to give him a beauty spot. And, Svet, now that I think about, I did ask God to help me spare his life."

  Darby was now really confused. He kept looking at Delchamps and Duffy to get their reaction to Pevsner's continued references to the Deity. But knowing of the genuine-if more than a little unusual-deep faith of Pevsner and the other Russians, their faces showed neither surprise or confusion.

  "And that's the way it worked out," Pevsner went on. "Charley and I had a cigar and a little cognac watching night fall in Vienna, and then we went to dinner."

  "At the Drei Hussars," Charley furnished. "Around the corner from the Opera House. By the time it was over, Alek and I were buddies."

  Pevsner gave him an annoyed look.

  "Charley," Pevsner continued, "said that he would do what he could with the President to call off the CIA and the FBI-they were then trying very hard to find me-if I would help him find the missing aircraft. I took a chance and trusted him.

  "I admit that finding the missing 727 wasn't difficult for me. I operate a number of airplanes in sub-Saharan Africa, and all of my crews always keep their eyes open for things in which they think I might be interested.

  "Cutting a long story short, Charley was able to take the 727 back from the Muslims before they could do any damage with it. And, as he said he would, he got the President to call off the FBI and the CIA.

  "I did not know of General Sirinov's plan to tweak the American lion's tail, and Sirinov had no reason to suspect that I even knew Charley, much less that I was the one who had been instrumental in upsetting it.

  "He did learn, of course, that Charley had flown the aircraft into MacDill Air Force Base in Florida. Charley was thus added to Sirinov's list of people to be dealt with when the opportunity presented itself.

  "Next, friend Charley messed up another SVR operation. Sirinov sent a team-under Cuban Direccion General de Inteligencia Major Alejandro Vincenzo-to Lieutenant Colonel Yevgeny Komogorov, his FSB man in charge of operations in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, to eliminate a man who knew too much and had also made off with sixteen million dollars of the SVR's money. When that escapade was over, Vincenzo and his men were dead, and Charley had the sixteen million dollars.

  "Since Komogorov needed somebody to blame for that disaster, he decided to blame it on me, reasoning that if I were dead, I couldn't protest my innocence. So he paid a large sum of money to my trusted assistant, the late Mr. Howard Kennedy, to arrange for me to be assassinated in the garage of the Sheraton Hotel in Pilar, outside Buenos Aires.

  "When that was over, I was alive and Komogorov wasn't. Corporal Lester Bradley had put an Indian beauty spot on his right eye. The others on his team were taken out by others working for friend Charley. And Mr. Kennedy went to meet his maker shortly thereafter.

  "All of this tended to reduce the all-powerful, faultless image of both the FSB and the SVR, which meant that the power of Sirinov and Vladimir Vladimirovich was becoming questionable.

  "Sirinov decided to settle the matter once and for all. With a great deal of effort, Sirinov ordered the simultaneous assassinations of a man in Vienna known to be a longtime deep cover asset of the CIA; a reporter for one of Charley's newspapers who was asking the wrong questions about Russian involvement in the oil-for-food program; Liam Duffy, who had interrupted a previously successful SVR drug operation in Argentina and Paraguay; and-"

  "So they're all connected," Alex Darby said.

  "Oh, yes. Please let me finish," Pevsner said. "And the assassination of another of Charley's men, a policeman in Philadelphia, who knew the Muslims who planned to crash an airplane into the Liberty Bell were not smart enough to conceive of, much less try to execute, an operation like that by themselves and suspected the SVR was involved.

  "When only the assassinations of the CIA asset in Vienna and of the journalist were successful, Sirinov had to report this failure to Putin. So far as Vladimir Vladimirovich is concerned, there is no such thing as a partial success. And Sirinov knew that the only thing worse than reporting a failure to Vladimir Vladimirovich was not having a credible plan to make things right.

  "And he had one: Dmitri and Svetlana had been ordered to Vienna to participate in a conference of senior SVR officers. The cover was the presence in Vienna of Bartolomeo Rastrelli's wax statue of Peter the First, which the Hermitage had generously loaned to the Kunsthistorisches Museum.

  "The Tages Zeitung journalist whom he had managed to eliminate was going to be buried with much ceremony in Marburg an der Lahn, Germany. There was no question that Eric Kocian and Otto Gorner, managing director of Gossinger G.m.b.H. would be there. With a little bit of luck, so would Karl von und zu Gossinger, who was not only the owner of the Gossinger empire but Lieutenant Colonel Castillo, who had been causing the SVR so much trouble. All three-plus at least some of Charley's people who would be with him-could be eliminated at the same time.

  "Tom's train would pass through Marburg on its way to Vienna. So Sirinov dispatched a team of Hungarians-ex-Allamvedelmi Hatosag-to Marburg, with orders to report to Polkovnik Berezovsky. Sirinov knew Dmitri-Tom-could be counted upon to supervise their assassination assignment with his well-known skill for that sort of thing. And then catch the next train to Vienna.

  "Well, that turned out to be an even greater disaster for General Sirinov, as we all know."

  "Through God's infinite mercy," Svetlana said very seriously.

  She crossed herself.

  "Svet," Pevsner said seriously, "you may very possibly be right, but there's also the possibility that it was the incompetence of the CIA station chief in Vienna that saved Charley and Kocian from the ministrations of the Allamvedelmi Hatosag."

  "It was the hand of God," Svetlana said firmly.

  "Possibly, Sweaty, it was the hand of God that contributed to Miss Eleanor Dillworth's incompetence," Delchamps said. "Same result, right?"

  Svetlana looked at him coldly, not sure-but deeply suspecting-that he was being sarcastic.

  "Eleanor is not incompetent," Alex Darby said loyally.

  "Come on," Delchamps said. "She was incompetent in Vienna. The rezident there… what was his name?"

  "Podpolkovnik Kiril Demidov," Barlow furnished. "He used to work for me."

  "Demidov was onto Dillworth," Delchamps said firmly. "Maybe he didn't know it was Tom and Sweaty, but he knew that-Jesus Christ!-Dillworth had a plane sitting at Schwechat airfield ready to haul some defector, or defectors, away from the Kunsthistorisches Museum."

  "You don't know that," Darby protested.

  "I know that your pal Eleanor should have known that Demidov was going to take out the Kuhls. And once that happened, she didn't have a clue what to do next. I asked her. She said she was 'waiting for instructions from Langley.'"

  "If I may continue, gentlemen?" Pevsner said a little impatiently.

  "I didn't trust her, Edgar," Tom Barlow said, ignoring Pevsner. "I don't know if it was that I thought she wasn't professional or what."

  "It was the hand of God," Svetlana insisted.

  "But once I saw the picture in the Frankfurter Rundschau of Charley getting off his private jet," Barlow went on, "I decided that Svetlana and I were going to leave Europe on that aircraft if I had to give him Sirinov and all the ex-Allamvedelmi Hatosag people."

  "And from that moment, until we walked into Alek's house here, everything went smoothly," Svetlana said. "Does no one see the hand of God in that?"

  "I do," Castillo said.

  When Sweaty looked at him, he sang, "Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so."

  "Don't mock God, Charley!" she snapped furiously and moved away from him on the couch.

  "Well," Pevsner said, "Dmitri and Svetlana were not intercepted in Vienna, and that was the end of that. Except of course that Liam applied the Old Testa
ment eye-for-an-eye principle to Lavrenti Tarasov and Evgeny Alekseev, who had come to Argentina in search of Tom and Svetlana."

  "Not quite," Delchamps said. "Alex's good buddy, Miss Dillworth, sicced a reporter-a good one: Roscoe J. Danton of The Washington Times-Post-on Charley. He came to Alex's apartment just before we got out of there."

  "A reporter? What did he want?" Castillo asked.

  "He wanted you, Ace. He probably wants to know why you stole Sweaty and Tom out from under Miss Dillworth's nose. And if Dillworth told him about that, I wouldn't be at all surprised if she told him you left the Vienna rezident-what was his name? Demidov?-sitting in a taxi outside our embassy with an Allamvedelmi Hatosag garrote around his neck, and her calling card on his chest."

  "I had nothing to do with that, as you goddamn well know. The story going around is that some old company dinosaur did that."

  "You sound like you think I had something to do with it," Delchamps said.

  "Do I?" Castillo said sarcastically.

  "Funny thing about those old company dinosaurs, Charley. You're too young of course to know much about them. But they really believe in what it says in the Old Testament about an eye for an eye, and if they do something like what happened to Demidov, they never, ever, 'fess up to it."

  "Changing the subject just a little," Tom Barlow said. "I think we should throw this into the facts bearing on the problem: Just as soon as Sirinov and/ or Vladimir Vladimirovich heard that the Americans had taken out the Fish Farm, they realized that information had to have come from me."

  "You don't know that," Castillo argued.

  "In our profession, Charley," Tom said, "we never know anything. All we ever have is a hypothesis-or many hypotheses-based on what we think we know."

  "Touche," Castillo said.

  "We all forget that at one time or another," Barlow said.

  Castillo met his eyes, and thought, That was kind of you, Tom.

  But all it did was remind everyone in this room that I am the least experienced spook in it.

  Which, truth be told, I am.

  "One of the things I was tasked to do in Berlin was make sure that the Fish Farm got whatever it needed," Barlow went on. "It's not hard to come up with a hypothesis that Sirinov and Vladimir Vladimirovich reasoned that since Polkovnik Berezovsky knew about the Fish Farm and it was destroyed shortly after Polkovnik Berezovsky defected to the Americans, whose CIA had looked into the matter and decided the factory was indeed a fish farm, Polkovnik Berezovsky told the Americans what it really was."

  "You knew what the CIA thought?" Charley asked.

  "Of course," Barlow said.

  "You had… have… a mole?"

  "Of course, but you don't need a mole to learn things like that," Barlow said. "Actually you can often learn more from a disgruntled worker who wouldn't think of betraying her country than from an asset on the payroll."

  "Your pal Dillworth, for example, Alex," Delchamps said. "What is it they say, 'Hell hath no fury like a pissed-off female'?"

  "Eleanor is a pro," Darby said, again showing his loyalty.

  "She pointed Roscoe Danton at Charley," Delchamps argued. "What hypothesis does that suggest?"

  Darby looked at Delchamps angrily, looked for a moment as if he were going to reply, but in the end said nothing.

  Castillo said, "What's your hypothesis, Tom, about the stuff from the Congo suddenly showing up at Fort Detrick?"

  "Well, it's clear it's got something to do with this," Barlow replied. "What, I don't know."

  "It could have something to do with Vladimir Vladimirovich's ego," Pevsner said.

  "He couldn't resist the temptation to let us know that we didn't wipe the Fish Farm off the face of the earth?" Delchamps offered.

  Pevsner nodded.

  "If he's got that stuff, he could have used it, and he didn't," Castillo said thoughtfully.

  "So, what's next?" Delchamps said. "I buy that stick-it-up-your-ass motive, Alek, but I don't think that's all there is to it."

  Pevsner nodded his agreement.

  "So Charley has to tell those people in Las Vegas that he's changed his mind about working for them," Barlow said.

  "Why would I want to do that?" Castillo replied. "The Office of Organizational Analysis no longer exists. I am in compliance with my orders to fall off the face of the earth and never be seen again. Sweaty and I are going to build a vine-covered cottage by the side of the road and live happily therein forever afterward."

  "There goes that sophomoric sense of humor of yours again," Pevsner snapped.

  "How so?" Castillo replied.

  "Vladimir Vladimirovich is going to come after you. And Svetlana," Pevsner said. "You ought to read a little Mao Zedong. He wrote that 'the only real defense is active defense.'"

  "Did he really?" Castillo said. "I wonder where he got that?"

  "Probably from Sun-tzu," Svetlana said seriously. "That's where most people think Machiavelli got it."

  "Sun-tzu?" Castillo asked. "That's the Chinaman who turned two hundred of the emperor's concubines into soldiers and won the war with them? I've always been an admirer of his."

  "It was one hundred eighty concubines," Svetlana said. "He got their attention by beheading the first of them who thought it was funny and giggled, and then he beheaded the second one who giggled, and then so on down the line until he came to one who understood that what was going on was no laughing matter."

  "Does anybody else think Sweaty's trying to make a point?" Delchamps asked innocently.

  "Let me make a point, several points," Castillo said seriously. "One, as far as the intelligence community is concerned, I'm a pariah. So is everybody ever connected with the OOA. They hated us when we had the blessing of the President, and now hating us is politically correct. I'll bet right now both the company and the FBI-hell, all the alphabet agencies-have a 'locate but do not detain' bulletin out on us. They're not going to help us at all. Quite the opposite: If we start playing James Bond again, we'll find ourselves counting paint flecks on the wall at the Florence maximum security prison in Colorado.

  "And, if I have to say this, we'll have less than zero help from anybody."

  "I think you're wrong about that, Charley," Barlow said. "We know that-"

  "Let me finish, Tom," Castillo said sharply. "Point two-probably the most important thing-is that any operation we might try to run would have to have a leader. And C. Castillo, Retired, cannot be that leader. What did President Johnson say? 'I shall not seek, nor will I accept…'"

  "You're wrong about that, too, Ace," Delchamps said. "I for one won't go-and I don't think any of the others will-unless you're running the show. And we have to go, since the option to that is sitting around waiting for some SVR hit squad to whack us. And, Romeo, what about the fair Juliet? You're going to just sit around holding Sweaty's hand waiting for the hit squad to whack her? Worse, drag her back to Mother Russia?"

  "You don't know how the others will feel," Castillo said, more than a little lamely.

  "Hypothesis: They'll all go. Any questions?" Delchamps said.

  "Count me in, Charley," Alex Darby said.

  "I wouldn't know where to start," Castillo said.

  "I'm not sure if you've ever heard this before," Barlow said. "But some people in our line of work think collecting as much intelligence as possible as quickly as possible is a good way to start."

  "And how would I go about doing that?"

  "That's what I started to say a moment ago," Barlow said. "You were there, Charley, in that suite in the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas when those people as much as told us that the director of Central Intelligence is either one of them, or damn close to them."

  "I don't remember that," Castillo said.

  "The man who was a Naval Academy graduate quoted verbatim to you the unkind things you said to the DCI, something about the agency being 'a few very good people trying to stay afloat in a sea of left-wing bureaucrats.' Who do you think told him about that?"

  "I
remember now," Castillo said. "But I really had forgotten. That's not much of a recommendation, is it?"

  "Charley, I said I'd take your orders," Delchamps said. "But… You saw The Godfather?"

  "Yes, of course."

  "Both Brando and the son-Pacino? De Niro? I never can keep them straight-had a consigliere. Think of me as Robert Duvall."

  "Think of us both as Robert Duvall," Barlow said. "It was Al Pacino."

  "I don't think so," Delchamps said.

  "Can either of my consiglieri suggest how I can get in touch with those people?"

  "Well, if you hadn't been gulping down all that Wild Turkey, I'd suggest you fly everybody to Carinhall in Alek's chopper. But since you have been soaking up the booze, I guess we'll have to drive over there and get on Casey's radio."

  "No," Castillo said. "There's a Casey radio in the Aero Commander."

  "It fits?" Delchamps asked, surprised.

  "Aloysius's stuff is so miniaturized it's unbelievable," Castillo said. "But call your house, Alek, and tell your man to stand by. There's no printer in the airplane. And you'd better call down to the airstrip and have them push the plane from the hangar."

  "Yes, sir, Podpolkovnik Castillo, sir," Svetlana said, and saluted him. Then she saw the look on his face. "My darling, I love it when you're in charge of things; it makes me feel comfortable and protected."

  "It makes me think Ace's had too much to drink," Delchamps said. "Aloysius, you think the offer from those people is still open?" Castillo asked.

  Castillo was sitting in the pilot's seat of the Aero Commander. Delchamps was in the co-pilot's seat. Svetlana was kneeling in the aisle and her brother was leaning over her. Pevsner, Duffy, and Darby were sitting in the cabin. Max and Janos were standing watchfully outside by the nose of the airplane.

  "I told them you'd change your mind," Casey said. "This thing sort of scares me, Charley. There was another beer keg of that stuff sitting on a road near the Mexican border in Texas this morning."

  "Another one?" Castillo asked.

  "Another one. They left it where the Border Patrol couldn't miss it. It's been taken to Colonel Hamilton at Fort Detrick. We're waiting to hear from him to tell us if it's exactly the same thing."